I start creating games where I was very young and create tons of small games as a amateurish game developer and two commercial games. I seen a lot of other beginner game developers that do same mistakes I did when I start with games and this is why I create list of five basic recommendations and hope that this tips helps to others.

1. Don’t aim too high
Many beginners want to create the ultimate FPS or MMORPG that can compete games from professional studios. Don’t do that and I recommend you don’t start working on FPS, RTS and similar genres: people will like the “Big” games instead of your clone.

2. Focus to small addictive games
Start creating small addictive games. Create simple game play with few unique features. Don’t forget on some score system. Users like to beat other players or ourselves.

3. Write concept document
Don’t starts creating your game until you write all of yours ideas to any document, although small games don’t required formal design document, some kind of idea list in notepad is great help. Don’t add new ideas to your games during development.

4. Play similar games
Find and play as many similar games as you can. That give you more expertise in your field and you can avoid the worst things that do your competition and find some great features that you can implement to your games.

5. Find team members
Game development is very complex area and nearly nobody can expertise all parts of work. Someone is great programmer, artist or game designer, but I can’t remember to a lot of people who can do it all in good quality. And you can find another advantage of having team members: game development will be much funnier with some other guys.

You know it, playing some (usually) flash game for a couple of hours and you’ve got an awesome score that can’t be bet by anybody, send it to the high scores and see that you are in 78,000th place. This must meet everybody who played any game with high scores.

It is a pity that none of developer don’t do anything with this and lost their players, because nothing is that frustrating then spend few hours of playing, feels that you play it like the God and seen that your score is completely rubbish.

Well, we found that global high scores are usually bad, unless you are really great player, but how to solve this kind of problem? Player likes to have high scores and competing to any score. The easier and efficient way is provide the high score of player: this model use developers very often and it is successful. The player sees their best score and tries to beat it. The player mind their progress and usually enjoy it.

Competitive players share theirs scores and try to beat each other. It is very similar to the global best scores table, but you shared it with few other (well known) players and it is much easier to bet few other players instead few thousand of the gamers.

When we work on Fish Fillets 2 we have this idea in mind and we develop comprehensive system of statistics. The Fish Fillets 2 is complex underwater puzzle game (I could write about it in some further post) and you have few types of statistics: How many rooms you solved, which rooms you solved, how much moves you need and so on. This statistics are automatically sorted to few categories and you can seem how good is your score in global table, how good you are in your nation or create group with your friends and compete each other. Our players like it and I hope that much more game developers will start doing the high scores this way. To see how our statistics works see online part of the Fish – Fillets page.

Tonight I found in my firefox favourites very old flash game, which I played for hours and hours. I love anime and manga and this game is using manga painted characters and looks really great. You are a girl on a bike, but it’s no racing. You have to crash into a boy, that will fly away and your task is to get him as far away from you as you can.

With this will help you other characters staying in the way. Of course, there are bad guys too. They will try to stop the boy to fly. If you are happy, you can try extra bonus bounces and this will grant you great help.

So, how far away from you can you this bad boy?:o)

The worst games I know are complex simulators. Well, I’m not sure, if they have to be called games, because controls are very complicated and you need whole keyboard and sometimes even this doesn’t measure up. Then there are many other games, where you use few buttons, another games use just mouse and mouse buttons, and in this game you will need just mouse – no clicking here;o)

Of course it’s pretty hard to make complex game without clicking, but this one is really easy. You have just to balance a disc on a stick and don’t let it fall down. It it does, you can start another try just with moving your mouse and geting disc up again.

Sound pretty easy, maybe stupid, but try it and you will see, that it’s more fun, then you though.

I am, the fan of music and amateurish musician and I always sadly looking to Guitar Hero that is released on consoles only and I am not console owner (well I own SegaDreamcast, Mega Drive = Genesis in the USA and NES , but I think that Guitar Hero will not be published on these platforms ) and I always look forward to find some clone of this great game. One sunny days I’ve got echo from my friend who found it, I download it and startlovin’ it.

The game is in fact very similar to the original Guitar Hero game in both visual and game play perspective. Main difference is in controller: there is no guitar controller, of course, and you must play it on the keyboard only. It is not too bad as it looks, but I recommend to set up your keyboard settings, the original F1 to F5 keys is not so comfortable to me and for, probably, most gamers. I think that hacking the original controller from Guitar Hero to work on PC will be easy job similar to hacking pads for Dance Dance Revolution game.

The game don’t include famous songs like Guitar Hero and come with just three songs, but if you spend some minutes to search the web you can find a tons of GB songs that satisfy your needed. Original songs came from authors of this game and especially one if quite good, the good one don’t include any description that you can’t miss it . The rest two is not too bad,especially if you like the metal or slow bass songs.

The best thing is that this game is completely free. I have another good news if you don’t use the Windows: you can download the Linux andMacOS version too. You can download this game from authors web page and you can find additional one bonus track too (I try this song one time only and I don’t like it, but it is up to you).

If you have nothing to do, but you have only a while, here is a flash game, that needs only few moments. You have to throw paper in the trash. It could be easy, but here is a complication. There is wind and every try it has another speed and direction everytime.

To control this game you need only left mouse button. When you are satisfied with the direction of throw, click the ball and throw it. Your task is to make hit so many times as you can in sequence.

To play this game in your browser, click here.

My tonight’s game is very easy but pretty addictive – you have two bats and two balls. As you move with mouse left and right, lower – bigger – bat is balancing and so is the ball on it. The higher, smaller bat, is going left and right. Your task is to don’t let any of balls fall down.

It needs some time to find the way, but this game won’t let you go and you will fight for every hundredth of second. Try not to be angry and don’t destroy your computer;oD So, how long can you hold on (play the game)?